Everything gets a brief. It does’t matter if we’re launch a product, a service, or a campaign…it has a brief.

Why a brief?

A brief forces you to write. And writing forces you to distill.

Why the f*%@ should I care?

You shouldn’t if you don’t want to win. This is a tool that makes everything you launch better and more consistent. Ultimately it will deliver measurable results.

A lot of people, especially in chaotic startups, underestimate how hard it is to distill a plan into words. They think it takes too much time to write and so they don’t. Or they assume that words take away from the organic nature of creating. It doesn’t, it improves it.

Putting words down makes you hone in the why, the what, and the how it’s different. It forces you to research and to think…how is the world doing this today and how can we do it different?

I didn’t start Moment with a brief. I wish I had, it would have been tighter. Instead, The Brief has been something we’ve developed the last three years into a staple for everything we do.

If you start using briefs, expect it to take time for your team to embrace it. You will get push back like this…why do we have to write all this down? Because it makes the work better. It makes it clear from 50′ down to the details why, what and how.

You’ll get this too…But everyone digests information differently, not everyone likes long docs. True, but we use words. You are welcome to add images, but words are a basic form of communication and we practice getting better at them.

And this…but I communicate better by talking. We can do that too, after you read and edit the brief. Because writing makes what you talk about more specific.

I didn’t work at Amazon, but everything they launch has a brief. Albeit a long one, but they use words to distill why, what, and how. It forces people to write down their assumptions and to validate if they were right or wrong. That learning is invaluable as you build competencies into the company.

How you execute off of a brief is up to you. We’ve evolved and struggled our way through this because it takes just as much discipline and process for people to pick up their sections of the brief and deliver them. We’ve tried check lists, Trello cards, and most recently Monday.

There are three levels you want your team to graduate to…

1) Read One – Reading, digesting, and executing their parts of the brief. Believe it or not, it takes practice to teach people how to read and understand it. They won’t ask questions and you will assume from that they understood it. This isn’t necessarily true. Reading and executing is something you have to work on internally until it becomes second nature.

2) Run One – The top of every brief has a project owner. It doesn’t mean they have to be author, but they do need to be the one who gets everyone to deliver. The best project leads are both charismatic and organized, two skill sets you need to get a group to execute.

3) Write One – Writing great briefs is hard. It takes a lot of re-writing and most people don’t want to do that. They think the time is better spent do anything other than writing. To do this well, one person in the company has to be excellent at this. Over time this has to grow into multiple, excellent brief writers. It doesn’t mean that writers have to run briefs. But it does mean they have to be excellent at creating break through ideas and distilling those into a plan.

I made a Brief Template for you and put in google docs. You are welcome to take it and make it better for your company.

Overview

This is your one pager. Anyone should be able to pick this up and understand the brief. If the project is really complicated, this section can be longer than one page, but that is the exception and not the rule.

Project Owner: This is the person who is going to run the project.

Problem: Distill this into a single sentence. You have to keep asking your self "why" until you are at the root problem you are trying to solve. This is harder than it looks.

What: This is an overview of what the project is about. If it has multiple parts then add "+" bullet points to list those. Here is where you want to really think about how this is different than anything else on the market. To do this section well is hard, you have to come up with a unique approach.

Measure Success: This how you keep score and should be 1-5 core metrics you care about. These metrics help you improve and measure future projects.

Dates: These are just high level dates. You can move to a more detailed project document to keep track of the more granular delivery dates.

Documents: How you organize your project folder is as important as the brief. From the folder to the sub folders to the key documents, finding things during the project should be simple.

Creative Direction

This section is not for everyone. One person on the team should write this section and do it for every project when you are small. That can be the CEO, a designer or a creative on the team. What’s critical is this person use the same template and process every time. If you don’t know how to do this then make friends with an awesome Art Director and have them teach you. Very few people know how to do this well.

Visual Theme: This is hard for people to wrap their head around but the template above has an examples. It’s about taking two contrasting inspirations, identifying 2-3 traits per, and then putting them together to create something new. The sentence is Blah (trait 1, trait 2, trait 3) meets Blah (trait 1, trait 2, trait 3).

Imagine…Apple (minimalism, detailed, precise) meets Patagonia (big beautiful images, adventure, and connection).

That mashup contains two polar opposites. Together they provide inspiration so your team can make something totally new.

Mood Board: This is also hard. You have to pick just 6-8 images that represent the visual theme you outlined. Each image should come from a side of the mashup. In the case of Apple and Patagonia you have to go deep in researching each brand and selecting specific image that represents the mash-up of (minimalism, detailed, precise) and (big beautiful images, adventure, and connection).

People get too literal in thinking this mood board has to include the exact fonts and colors they want to use. You can include these items, as long as the images selected come directly form the mashup and not other sources of inspiration.

Campaign Name: The external name for the campaign. It should be short and easy to understand.

Inspire: More to come about how to write messaging, but this is a 3-5 word phrase or short sentence that sets the inspire level of the campaign. Such as…Small Camera. Big Films.

Explain: If you ignore everything else and just practice explain level messaging you’re ahead of the game. Here is where we write a 1,2,3 that the public will read to understand what your campaign is about. It should be actionable and easy to understand.

Example…. Introducing the Moment 58mm Lens. Closer, tighter, crispier shots. Buy it today, save 20%.

How – By Phase

You can do this part of the brief any way that you want. The purpose is for one person to think through the whole experience of the campaign and then break out all the parts you have to launch. This isn’t a long checklist. Instead it’s organized into clear phases and within each phases chunks of experiences that have to ship together.

How: Each phase of the project starts with a new How section. This makes it clear to the team for how this project rolls out. Often we’ll have Teaser, Launch, and Post Launch phases to every project.

Touch Point Template: As we get into each piece we have to launch we use the same template with a title, problem, statement, and bullet points of what has to happen. This again reinforces people learning how to distill problems and then come up with ways they want to solve those problems.

Downloadable Template

If you missed it above I created a google doc with this template that you can use and make better for your company.

The Brief – Template

If you have any questions, email me or dm me.